Dissenting Dialogues: Prof. David Millard Haskell on DEI, Freedom of Expression, and Societal Shifts

we really just have to go back to what we were doing that was successful and that was treating everyone as individuals and and saying, I'm going to judge you on your character. And I know that gets overused in MLK, Martin Luther King and all that stuff. But you actually that was that was good. There's Hello and welcome to Awake at the Wheel. So on today's episode, we have guest professor David Millard Haskell. He is an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier and he's here to chat with us today about many issues surrounding diversity, DEI, and wherever the conversation takes us today. So welcome, Dave. Well, thank you very much. So tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. So whatever you like listeners to know, Go ahead. Well, I've been at Wilfrid Laurier University for about 20 years now. And before I became an academic, I was a broadcast journalist. And so when I came into Laurier, they put me into a really unique position. I was able to be a sociologist of religion because that's what my research was. But I also got to still play in the field of journalism a bit. About half my course load is in journalism, the other half is in sociology, religion, religion and culture stuff. And even even though I say religion and culture, really, I look at cultural trends and I look at it through the eyes of a sociologist and most often through the use of empirical data. Okay. So, Oren, I know you wanted to kind of jump off with some some questions of how you and Dave first got acquainted. So I'll leave it to you here. Okay. So yes, so I first heard about you after I think it was November 10th, 2017. Right? Right. Right. Because of the Lindsay Shephard affair, which had happened just the day before. Dr. Jordan Peterson talked about it in a free speech talk that he and Dr. Gad Saad had and myself were part of. And and he talked about how, you know, this whole thing with Lindsay Shephard, a grad student, I think it was grad students to. Understand it. Had been cornered by these DEI experts and professors, and she recorded it, which a lot of people in Canada didn't realize. It's a single consent country. You know, as long as you're part of the conversation, you can record it. And if she hadn't recorded it, things may have gone very differently because she was able to show what was happening. And there was a lot of silence at Laurier. But you were one of the few, if not the only voice. I think maybe there was one of the first. I'm not sure how you talk about your role in all of that and how you spoke out for free speech, Truth, academic integrity. Yeah. Well, I want to also give kudos to you or and you might not remember it, but really at the at the beginning of that controversy with Lindsay, Lindsay Shepherd, I knew that you had contact information for Jordan Peterson because you and he had done numerous things together. I reached out to you and you helped me get in touch with Jordan, because, as you know, at that point, it was a very small pond of those people who were willing to speak out for freedom of expression. And I was trying to marshal my resources. So thank you, by the way, that that was you who put me in touch with Jordan back then, but related to Lindsay and who was stepping up. A colleague of mine, Will McNally. He has been a fierce defender of freedom of expression for the longest time. Also, Jordan Goldstein, he was an adjunct professor and he was brave enough, even though it probably ended up costing him future contracts. He also spoke up for freedom of expression. So there are a few of us now to make that a little more relevant, though. That's out of 500 full time faculty. You know, you had Will and me and then Jordan Goldstein and basically silence from everybody else. And what had happened, of course, just to remind your listeners and viewers, Lindsay Shepherd had shown in her class she was a T.A. and she was doing on a lecture on pronouns, and she said, you know, pronouns might seem boring, but in fact, right now, in terms of the popular consensus, they're pretty controversial. And then she showed this video of Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matt, who's also at U of T discussing pronouns, and they were against each other. Jordan was saying, I don't want to make up pronouns that don't exist historically. And Nicholas Matt was saying, you should. And she just showed that it was something that had already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on TV. it was. It was done by the public broadcaster. Anyway, she was taken to task for showing that publicly available video and without going into everything about it, she was called on the carpet. Her supervisor for her program said this is tantamount to hate speech. There are some ideas not up for debate. You showed this. You harmed people in your class. There were complaints against you. It later turned out that there were no complaints against her, that in fact, that was made up. The teachers had heard about it through some students talking and they weren't complaining. But the teachers then launched a complaint. She was eventually Lindsay Shepherd was exonerated that she'd done nothing wrong. Interestingly, the president of our university, she went on the agenda. That was the show where Nicholas, Matt and Jordan had gone earlier and she was asked, has Lindsay done anything wrong? This is in the first couple of weeks of the controversy, and she wouldn't even say that she'd done nothing wrong. She wouldn't defend her. So going back to this idea, who would defend Lindsay Shephard? Not very many. But as we move like from 2017 when that was going on to today, more and more people are coming on side to see that we should have been defending free expression back then. Our universities were heading in a really terrible direction And and unfortunately, we haven't been able to stem the tide. But at least there are more people becoming aware of just how troubled our university campuses are. Right. And yeah, that was really that was a canary in the coal in the proverbial coal mine right at the time. And yeah. So yes. And with one Macaulay, you and Jordan had done a video, the three of you. Sure. I think within the year after that. And I think it got a lot of attention. You were talking about these matters. So after you did that, after you were speaking out, were there any professional or interpersonal repercussions? Yeah, there were. I have my own fan club. Will and I have our own fan club. It's called WLU Change Is Due, and it's dedicated to firing us. So that was one of the fallout. It's the Fan Club is comprised of faculty who typically remain anonymous, but then student activists and other activists locally, they petition our administration to try and get us gone unsuccessfully. And the reason it's been unsuccessful so far is because that we really do not dislike anyone and we really only want to see that both sides of an argument can be heard. And right so far that's not illegal. Although, you know, increasingly, as I look at the online harms bill, as I look at other bills that are pending at both well, mostly federally, I begin to worry that even that isn't going to be enough to save you, you know, that you're telling the truth and that you want both sides to be heard. That's not going to be enough. So, Dave, what motivates you to to push through that, though, knowing that there are such potential dire consequences, why do you still speak up and push through? Well, Oren would probably say it's something in my psyche. He'd probably want to do a personality evaluation and see where I stand. But I think that part of it is I came from and I still am a conservative Christian. And coming through that background as a conservative Christian, I as someone who was a conservative Christian, who actually did okay in school and then went off to university and did graduate work as well. It was a fairly hostile environment to people of faith and in particular people of the Christian faith. And so that taught me to really value freedom of expression. I really saw where certain ideas that people of faith hold were not allowed to be spoken. And I thought that just wasn't fair. And and by being on the wrong side of many cultural issues as a conservative Christian, it taught me to be thick skinned, but it also taught me that I need to speak out for anybody who is trying to say something in good faith, backed by empirical evidence or backed by a true desire to see the world better. You know, and I think that that stuck with me from my high school days, and then it solidified during my university experience. And then when the opportunity came to just stand up, whether it was Lindsay Shepherd or other things that maybe Will and I have taken part in where our university has said something that just didn't align with empirical evidence, it really it was my experience within my faith community and my own personal experiences with faith. That said, you've got to tell the truth. Amazing. Yeah, I mean, I've we talked with the teacher, Warren Smith, and now you're asking similar questions. And it really does boil down to in many of these cases, when you look at the people who are truly willing to go against the tide, not do the easy thing about joining whatever social movement is popular, but speaking out against it and not for any reason other than it doesn't align with the evidence. It's not helping us. It's not truth. Right. It really does seem to boil down to some form of values. And in your case, you're saying that your values are steeped in or is stem from, at least in part, the religion or a religious background. Sure. Sure. And I think you see that really I look at a lot of cultural leaders on the right and that's kind of a fuzzy notion. But I look at people like Dennis Prager, for example, and I look at people like Ben SHAPIRO and I look at other people in the Christian community who are really the Liberty Coalition spoke out during the mandates. For example, they were a contingent of Christian pastors, people who are really, really dedicated to a conservative faith that also is rooted in a Western tradition, tend not to fear the authorities. You know, there's really something to be said by not fearing humans and being more concerned about being at odds with the ultimate. Right. Yeah. So and I know you looked I don't know how much you're doing today, but you're looking at, like, religion and youth and, like, what would you say is the trends these days with youth and the religious movements and the various types of religions? Well, it's not really good news for most religions. I think that what we're seeing is a decline in religion among youth generally, not so much among immigrant children or children or first, second, first and second generation immigrants, because that tends to be so tied to culture that they will embrace it more. But for youth in general, especially across the West, the interest in religion has declined. And a lot of that is not that religion has lots lost its cachet. It's just that it's well, it has lost its cachet. It's been stigmatized. That's an easier way to say it. And right when you stigma stigmatize something, you get less of it. Right. I recall you might remember when they were stigmatizing butter, they were saying don't eat butter, and they were really pushing margarine and butter sales fell incredibly. But I use that example because it turned out that the whole reason they believed that butter was some kind of death, toxic substance was the they done experiments on rabbits who shouldn't have been eating butter anyway. And it was all based on these rabbits. And it turned out that butter was better for you than the hydrogenated stuff that you were eating margarine. Now, I mention that because I think it's very similar to religion. We hear all these things stigmatizing it. But when you look at the effect on youth, for example, it leads to some of the highest levels of pro-social behavior in some of the lowest levels of antisocial behavior, lowest rates of addiction, the highest rates of mental stability, etc.. So it's actually often a really, really good inoculate to all the things that might trouble youth, but it continues to be stigmatized. And as a result, you see less of it. So Oren and I have spoken about this many times in this podcast as far as this removal of religion from the household, from the family, from really all facets of life and society probably plays a strong role in people now latching on to ideology. And a lot of the things that we're seeing in the world and people's focus on that. So can you talk a little bit about perhaps your view on that? Yeah, I think that that's absolutely right. People want to have a grand narrative. We use narratives to make sense of our lives. And at one point, I mean, even a hundred years ago, that grand narrative was passed down from mother to children, father to children, and often it was rooted in some kind of scriptural or sacred story. And we need that. It really says, How do I live? How do I live Well within the Christian tradition? One of the things is you've got to put others before yourself. Within the Christian tradition is also the idea that you must speak out for justice. A lot of people think that Christianity says you shouldn't judge that. That's not it at all. Christianity actually demands that you judge, but you do it in a way that isn't hypocritical. So all this is to say that what we used to have was a transference of what we held to be the greatest good. It was passed on to kids and they got it. And not only that, our institutions also backstopped this. Our institutions were very religion friendly. And that goes from government to media to our school system. But in the absence of that, in the absence of those grand narratives that were transferred down, now youth are still looking for a grand narrative. And typically they're taking whatever is being sold by Tik-Tok or their their school teacher or even government messaging. And that is not healthy because they're exchanging what their their ancestors have held to be good for thousands of years and distilled as the good for thousands of years for something that is really the fashion of the day. Right. Okay. And the fashion of the day. Unfortunately, one of those fashions or a couple of them are DEI and critical race theory and you were in the news and all over the media and social media in the last couple of weeks because of a study that you were discussing in all these platforms. And can you kind of give the summary and basically, if someone is if someone is, say, on the fence, they're wondering why, what's wrong with, you know, diversity and so on or, you know, why should my kids not be taught to be good citizens and everything? Can you sort of like not just say what you found, but kind of just compel people to understand why some of us are so concerned about what's been going on last number of decades? Wow. Okay. Oren, you've given me like an hour to talk now. Right. So I really the first thing I'd I'd want to mention is that it did get significant media coverage from the Post media chain. And it also got significant media coverage from what we would call the new media or the alternative right media, True North Rebel post millennial. But it didn't get a single bit of coverage from Torstar papers, CTV, Global, The Globe and Mail. Now, that's very interesting because increasingly we are living in a bifurcated society and people know this, but there is so often information that people who only gravitate to the legacy media and I'm excluding the National Post here because the National Post still is doing an okay job at giving some alternative sides of the issue. But most mainline media are not reporting on anything that hints of classical liberalism or conservatism. They're just not touching it. And it went so far as this. Let me let me give you this example. So it my my research report on DEI and it shows that DEI actually doesn't do what it says it does. And we'll get to that in a moment. But it had gone across Canada and it was put into every paper in the Postmedia chain and there are hundreds and then it was put into a number of smaller or weekly, different weekly newspapers. So it was really getting great coverage and that was about a weekend. And so I sent off an email to my local Toronto Star owned paper. So the paper in my area is the Waterloo Region record, and it was a very friendly letter. I said, or email. I said, I notice that there's been no coverage. You were sent a press release on the same day as the other national media. I'm wondering if you might reconsider now that it's clear that it had news value as as shown by this national coverage. And not only that, it was done by a local professor, which increases the news value. And I didn't cite the study, but there was actually a study done by a couple of guys called Gold Tongue and Rouge in the 1960s that determine what news value is and and news value actually has a formula. And this particular piece, this report that I did, it met all the criteria in this case. It was a controversial story. It it would contradict a main point of what we consider conventional wisdom. It was significant. And then from this perspective, the Waterloo region record, which is my home newspaper, it was also significant because the local guy was responsible for it. So I sent about this email. I said, just wanted to know, are you going to consider covering it? And and if you don't have the staff, I said, I know resources are are very slim. Listen, a former professional journalist, I'm happy to write up an op ed for you so you don't even have to spend money on your staff and you can edit it. Right. They didn't even respond. And so I would just point this out because you'd mentioned that it got national coverage and it did, but only from certain players. And this has to be a worry for your audience and for Canadians in general, because half the story on numerous things from and I'm going to just pick some of the hot topics. So from gender ideology to what's happening in race to what's happening in climate change up, you're not getting told the truth because the truth would be the full story. Yeah. And so that's a worry. Now, with that out of the way, the research report I did was really something basic. As far as academics go. I didn't even do any new research. I just took a lot of research and and put it all together to be able to tell the story about DEI about the field of DEII. So I took what was already out there, which simply hadn't been covered. And let me let me point out that what I was pulling out were significant studies, studies that had encapsulated years, like almost 20 years of evidence on D-I and into the realm of a foul in different studies. So there was there were meta analyzes that I was quoting from. There were and everything was from major peer reviewed journals. There were not any of these fringe little articles. I mean, it was I was only going with the best research from the best researchers as well. I had the research from people from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.. So it was really high quality research. But again, it was research that had been ignored. Which begs the question, why was it ignored? But I put it all in one place in this research report. And essentially what I wanted to do was answer whether or not the claims of DEI diversity equity inclusion were true and what's their claim? Their claim is that DEI initiatives make the world better. That's what they say. They say that if you attend DEI training, it makes you less prejudice. It increases harmony between between workers. So I was able to explore that or I was able to pull out the findings from others and just put it all in one place and write it in a way that was accessible. Excuse me, accessible for a lay audience. And it was pretty damning because it showed that those claims that DEI does something positive are simply not justified. There is no empirical support for those claims, but there's really good evidence that it does harm, that it can actually increase prejudice and it can divide a community and shut down dialog. Excellent summary, sad summary. I don't know what's or the what you have. You didn't find it because as you say, it's been reported before, but you really laid it out so clearly and unequivocally. So I know, etc.. The fact that that's the reality or as you're saying that let's say half the population is never going to see this or hear about this. And it's it's particularly terrible when you consider that it is doing harm. And I don't know how the reporters who refuse to act on this and I don't know how the the academic administrators who refuse to act on this can justify it when the clear empirical evidence shows that it is dividing society and in it is creating hostility. And yet, in the name of ideology, they say nothing. In fact, they say the opposite. They say that it is still valid. And at some time there's got to be a moral reckoning on this because it's no longer to the point where it's just some kind of well, you believe what you believe and I'll believe what I believe. And, you know, let's just be laissez faire about it. It's it's really damaging society. In fact, if you look at any survey that asks people about what's going on in Canada right now, 70%, 70% of Canadians now believe that our country is broken. And that goes up into the about 83, 85% if that person is on the conservative side. But on average, about 70, 70% of people think the country is broken. And I would say a large part of that is due to the division caused by DEI and its other side projects, whether that's anti-racism education, which indeed is racist education or critical race theory or radical gender ideology, all those things, they are put together under the larger mandate of DEI and it's simply toxic. So as far as why people are avoiding this research in these facts like the plague, do you think in part it's because it doesn't suit the narrative that they've pumped out and they can't deal with the the cognitive dissonance that comes from, wait, maybe I was wrong. That would be part of it. I always look at the financial imperative first. There's a lot of money to be made by promoting DEI The people who are actually the gurus of this. They're not going to say anything, but some of them are academics. They're not very good academics. And I say that because if you look at the publication records, they're not very good and often they're found to have poor methodologies or even egregious methodology. So we'll leave it at that. But they have a vested interest. Their jobs depend on DEI doing something and it's in under their claims, it's doing something positive. So you're not going to get them to renounce DEI For administrators, the pressure on them to adhere to DEI principles is now so great because the people you only need 10% of the population to really advocate for something loudly and that's enough to sway the entire population. Well, those loud 10% have caught the ear of administrators. Administrators. They like it because they can get money. Right. So let's go back to the money idea. You've got the gurus who like the money, so they just want to keep promoting these false ideas, the administrators. They like the money you can get for DEI from the government. The federal government exclusively gives grants under the guise of DEI and no university wants to turn down that kind of money with with large corporations. Let's move into there. The reason that they are very interested in DEI it's a diversion tactic. You have so much collusion now and corruption at the highest levels of our larger businesses. And we saw it in things like, well, if you look at the media companies like Twitter or Facebook, they purposely suppress ideas. I mean, they are there are censorship machines, but a way to get people not to look at that or the banks. Let me let me pick on the banks. The banks with they're charging for fees related to even interact and and you've got grocery stores who actually colluded on the price of bread, which is factual. I mean, that happened in Canada. They colluded on the price of bread so that people would pay more money for a staple for their family anyway. So you see that there's that kind of corruption. How do you divert from that? You say, look at virtuous, we are look at all our DEI stuff. Don't look at all of our corruption, don't look at all of our collusion. Instead, look at how noble we are and we're going to put signs. We're going to put progress, pride, flag flags in every office, just a virtue signal, how good we are. And and so that is a really clever plan. And businesses are going to try and abandon that when it's such a great diversionary technique. Governments, of course, they will use it. Not so much to gain money, but to gain votes. You can make sure that you have strong blocks of, well, certain communities that will vote only for you if you keep promising to give money to those communities. I guess so money is involved. There we go. So that's a very long answer to a simple question. Yeah. So I imagine and perhaps I'm assuming, but I imagine that you get a lot of criticism and flak because you are a white man who is criticizing this stuff. So what is some of that criticism and how do you respond to it? I well, I don't really even give it any time it would just and this is not me using censorship as a tool. I'm just saying that you don't know my background. I'm not going to play that game. You don't know the individual variables that went into making David Millard Haskell. And so that's a nonsensical argument to me. If we're not looking at each person as an individual and and recognizing that each individual has privileges as well as disadvantages, I mean, we're lost. So I refuse to play that game. So I get lots of criticism online. I just don't really respond to it. The only time I do respond to it is if I use it as an example of what not to do. Yeah, for example, I put out a particular public piece of writing that was talking about critical race theory, which again really does fall under DEI And I was saying how damaging critical race theory is in our public schools and our public school teacher, a high school teacher, she wrote on social media, she responded me and she said, and I'm paraphrasing here, why would we listen to anything you say? The studies you're quoting are by white men and so I thought, thank you. Thank you for showing the entire world. And hopefully the parents of the students at your high school how discriminatory you are. And not only that, how dangerous you are to academic advancement. You're going to discount really excellent research because of someone's skin color. That's the height of racism. Yeah, but they don't see that because if we were to substitute, I'll I'll use brown because I'm brown. If we are criticizing brown scientists, that would be racist. So how is this good? Yeah, well, and we know the deleterious effects of this into the 1920s. Canadian universities would not allow Jewish professors. There were quotas. And I look at that and I think, okay, you have purposely excluded and at the time and this is backed up by SATs. So standardized testing, you've excluded some of the top scholars and researchers from your universities simply because you disagree, because you have this. I think it's just this ridiculous prejudice against someone's ethnicity. And so all universities suffered because of that here in Canada. And then finally we came to our senses and we said, actually, you know what? Let's let merit and competency be the only measure. But we saw it happen with with Jewish professors right here in Canada, even in the 1920s. And now it's happening again. If you're white male, and we have exclusionary hiring in our universities, incidentally, I hope your audience knows this, that this is not a thing of the past. Every week, new job postings come out for Professor positions in Canada and in them it says now it says only these groups can apply. But suspiciously absent is white and male. So, I mean, it's happening now and you simply you can't keep your society together if that's the kind of ideology that you're going to push. So I have to ask you, I mean, and again, everything you're saying, I know I repost all the time, you know, on X. All of these, like, you know, whether it's Jonathan Kay or Chanel Pfahl who has been on our podcast, who, you know, highlight this or showing what is actually going on. So it's there. And now I understand that a large segment of society will never see it because they're just, you know, again, racist, white, white, colonialist, whatever you want to call them. So I have to ask you, what do you think? Why do you believe and there are many theories about this that, let's say the left are so susceptible to know, I guess, blindly following this ideology aside from not having a religion to follow, is it simply that are there other factors that make them more vulnerable to this poor? I'm going to give an answer that that I don't think is a great answer, but it came to mind right away. And I'm going to admit I don't think it's a great answer. But if you look at all the survey data from the last five years, and I'll commend your viewers to look at it, Pew Pew Research out of Washington did this recently. Others have done it as well. There's a lot of peer reviewed information about this, too. About 50% of those on the left have been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness. And I'm not I'm not being funny. I'm not right. This is and I think it's more than 50% when you go for for females who doesn't self designate as progressive or or left. And I think that people who are cognitively compromised are more susceptible to manipulation or other kinds of vulnerabilities related to bad actors. And maybe that wasn't always the case, but it is now and in some people. Well, a lot of people will say, well, it's the religious people who have blind faith. But in fact, I can tell you as a sociologist of religion, that that when you look at survey data and peer reviewed data, people of strong religious faith are actually the least likely to adhere to fringe or fringe beliefs or conspiracy theories. And it's because they have a particular belief that inoculates them from that. And I think that well, there's a lot of reasons behind that. But but I think that in the absence of religion and it was Chester Chesterton who said this, G.K. Chesterton, he says in the absence of belief, you don't stop believing, you just believe anything. And I think that we're seeing that. And so those on the left tend to be less religious. They less they have less of an absolute truth. And so they're willing to believe anything that comes across as truth to do. I don't know how you preface it with it's a bad answer. I think it's an excellent answer. I think it's insightful and I think it applies to many people. So whenever I go off, you know, and I'm just out of my area and I'm speculating, I like to not say I'm speaking from empirical authority or I'm just speaking from conjecture. Yeah. Right. Which is particularly important because as you said earlier, it's like you like to look at the empirical evidence, you like to look at data. So if this is, you know, an informed opinion that's different than, you know, providing the evidence. So I appreciate the distinction. So, yeah, and just another distinction, because you talked about mental illness. So, you know, there's a lot of stigma around mental illness. So a lot of it is about depression and anxiety. So that in of itself does not necessarily compromise someone's cognitive functioning. Like it's not that. But if somebody is depressed, we sorry, we do know that depression can, you know, affect your sense of self-worth. It can affect, you know, your thoughts of the future and so on. And it can also affect your function, make you a harder harder to, you know, to think to to make decisions and so on. And anxiety when you're spending all of your energy trying to keep, you know, keep yourself in your skin and so on, it does, in fact, compromise the cognitive capacity. So we're not saying that it's a symptom of it, but it is a of the mental health issues that you're describing. So, yes. And and all of it, again, especially anxiety. It's about fear. People, you know, the future is uncertain. Everything around you, uncertain. Don't trust the science, don't trust the experts and all this other stuff. So, yes, people are trying to find something that they can believe in, something that and we've talked about this before, Molly, something that's above them. Greater than that, you know, it's a saying that's what that's the role that religion is plays in many people's lives is something greater than myself. And so without that, as you say, people are latching on to it, trying to find something to believe in, something to make them virtuous. And I don't know what the data show is, but I wonder and I'm saying essentially the same thing that you guys are saying, but these folks who have perhaps a higher likelihood of having mental health disorders, I wonder if they are attracted to these ideologies, though, because it it includes them. It's more inclusive. It allows them to feel a sense of belonging. Perhaps I don't know. But I wonder if that plays a role. And. Well, part of it is it's a very simplistic message, message as well. And simplicity is more captivating. And in particular, going back to the idea of DIY, it is really very simple. There are bad people and there are good people and you should be the good people and the good people. They do this and the bad people. They do this and it erases all nuance and that's very attractive. And the greatest irony and it's I'm a fan of irony, but in this case I'm kind of despondent over it. The fact that all of this really is being fomented in and promulgated by the people who are the highest educated, not necessarily the smartest, but they are the highest educated in academia, they should know better they should have critical thinking. Yet we're seeing this not play out. So in your experience as a professor in a university in a hotbed of this kind of mess, what are you seeing? How does it affect you? Are there are there colleagues that you guys meet in the cafeteria in the corner where you commiserate? How do you deal in this environment? you know, it's funny because I I actually will find myself in situations where I'll get on an elevator and someone from who's a faculty member of my own university will will turn around in the elevator. So as not to face me. Or I'll be walking down in a hall and, you know, I'll say good morning. And they will turn toward the wall to avoid meeting my gaze. And that to me is very interesting. And it because of who I am and where I've come from, I don't think they realize it doesn't have the effect on me that they're hoping in fact that it makes me a little bit more interested in pursuing them. So I'll begin a conversation with them as they continue down the hall. Or if they're back to me, I'll say I'll say, you know, I don't know about the color in this elevator. What do you think? You know? And so I, I just kind of have a little bit of fun at their expense, not not anything hostile. But if they're going to behave like a child, I will respond as I would with my own kids, you know, by just trying to carry on the conversation. But it it does get I mean, it does wear on you no matter if you can make light of it. Yes. But it does wear on you. And if I didn't have other colleagues and I mentioned Will McNally before and there's another colleague, Jeff HAUSMAN, who's a biochemist at Laurier, and I've got other faculty who are part of there's a group called the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, and it's all across Canada, the Society for Academic Freedom in scholarship. And and we are very disparate in our views, but we're held together by the belief that there should be academic freedom. And it's neither conservative nor nor liberal. It's really just we all agree that ideas should be unencumbered by ideology. And so being part of that group has also given me some solace. It's made me feel like I'm part of a larger community. So there are academics out there that we can commiserate together. But you do need that community and or and you probably have experienced that as well. You need somebody to talk to somebody who knows what you're going through. But if you have that you don't need, you don't need an entire canopy, all you need, I'm sort of taking there was a guy, Peter Berger, who talked about what you needed to sustain a particular belief system. He said you needed a sacred canopy. I don't think you need a sacred canopy. I think you just need a sacred umbrella. And that is to say you need just a small group of people who are on the same team as you and they've got your back. Yeah, yeah, sounds right. You know, and we talk about all the time, but like, what can people do, you know? And we talk about that finding like minded people who, you know, again, that you can talk about so you don't feel like you're going crazy. B So that you can maybe, you know, maybe get together and maybe push for some change. So I've got to ask you, university students, high school students, parents, you know, you know, faculty, people in other companies, politicians, what would you what advice would you give them for? Anyone who wants to try to make some change because they know the changes necessary. What do you say? I'm going to give them the black pill. You know how people talk about the red pill is when you awaken in the black pill is when it's like, well, that seems very, very, very drastic. So the black pill is this you actually have to sacrifice. You actually might have to lose your job. You are at a spot. We are at a spot in our society where silence has cost us everything and we have no choice. And so those who are keeping their heads down, you are you are not going to be safe. Keeping your head down will not keep you safe. And it certainly won't keep your children safe. And so if you and I'm talking to parents, hopefully because people who are without children, it's more difficult to convince them, although some people just have a sense of duty and justice. But for those who have kids, we are entering a society. We are becoming a society where merit won't matter and competency won't matter. And if your children happen to be the wrong shade of pigment like Caucasian, it's going to be very bad for them. But not only that, there will be pathologies within the people of color within that community because you cannot imbibe at the the tit of discrimination and not taste that sour milk. You can't it's going to it's going to ruin you. So anyway, back to this idea. People today need to sacrifice. They need to realize that it is a historical anomaly that we haven't had to sacrifice. Typically, you have to sacrifice your your life either because you're being persecuted in one country and you have to leave for another or there's a war and you have to go over and fight for freedom. Well, happily, we've escaped that or we've at least put that on pause. But you do have to sacrifice. And if you don't, your kids will. So what you think you're avoiding, you're not avoiding. You're just putting it on your kids. So now is the time and realize that we are at a stage, just as the Puritans were before the Glorious Revolution, where the Americans were before the American Revolution. You know, pick your pick your revolution. And I don't I'm not I'm not advocating picking up arms or anything like that. What I'm saying is there comes a time in society when you actually have to do something that will call into question and potentially compromise your way of life. And now's that time. And so let's say a thousand people hear that. How many people do you think will act on that? This is another problem with the decline in religion. Religion is made for this, especially those religions that teach to be more interested in others than yourself. If you've been bred in that, it begins to make sense outside of a religious framework. I don't know who would want to actually take the advice I just offered because it wouldn't make sense. You know, at our core, we really are about self-preservation and that only in most cases only extends to our family. This idea that we would have a longer view and actually care about society in general and the the children of our neighbors is pretty foreign. Right. And sadly and again, I use the term ironically, again the, you know, the term but the social justice warriors, right. They do believe they're fighting for a righteous cause. They do believe that, you know, that they are fighting against the impending, you know, take over of, you know, the evil Nazis, colonial, etc., etc.. And so they are motivated to do that. And the thing is, for them, it's very little sacrifice. They have all the glory without the sacrifice. Sometimes without the action. The Slack division is very slacktivism. It's like, yeah, it's so easy to do and they get such a reward from doing that. And as Ali said earlier, said inclusion. I'm part of a group and they do believe in something greater than them because they are fending off the right evil or so. Yeah. So they really do hold all the cards right now. How do you suggest that somebody balance out self preservation with personal sacrifice? Because I think that, you know, you're you make a great point there, but self preservation seems to be at the top of most people's list. It Well, it doesn't make sense. It's paradoxical, isn't it? It really it doesn't make sense that you would consider sacrifice for the benefit of others. That does not make sense. So apart from these very radical religious systems that really don't make sense, of which I'm a part of, I don't know. But but I mean, I don't want to get all theological on you, But but the Christian, for example, would say, well, actually, I'm playing the long game. And the long game is that this life is not all there is. And I'm not trying to say pie in the sky for the sweet by and by kind of thing. But there certainly is an idea within Christianity that you are able to make dramatic, take dramatic risks in this life, knowing that this isn't all. And so that's part of it. Right. And then once you've been brought up in a system as well that says really the extent to which you put others before yourself is the extent to which you are a good person, you know, when that becomes where you get your status from, then and again, I'm not trying to say that Christians aren't altruistic or people of religious faith in general aren't, but they're I mean, it all works together, you know, so your point or your question is how do you get people to sacrifice? And I said, no. And I mean, I if I'm talking to a religious person, then I can speak a language to them. But I don't really know how you convince someone who doesn't have religious convictions, like sincere religious convictions, healthy religious convictions. By the way, incidentally, you know I just want to I'm not I'm not advocating any kind of self-immolation. I'm not saying anything about these kind of Christian Christianity or Orthodox Judaism doesn't push you in this direction. Right. I'm I'm saying that. But but it does say be willing to take a risk that, in fact, the greatest thing you can do, the greatest person you can be, is the person who sacrificed himself for his friends, for the greater good. So I don't know. I mean, that sounds really religious and I'm not trying to be. But but you've hit a quandary. I mean, I don't know. I don't know a part. I, I can give you a religious answer. I can't give you a sociological answer. Okay. Yeah. Although, I mean, for what you're saying, I mean, people can if they frame it properly, if they make it part of their value system, whether it's man be doing well, you know, what men are designed to do or whether no women protecting society, the children and so on, it can be framed that way, I guess. Then you're. Right. Okay. Thank you. Because I was I maybe I was in because that is accurate. I think that you can even what you would have to do is tie it to an evolutionary response related to protection and well, both for men and females and say and this is why it's a more powerful argument if people are as well, because then then it does away from the religious impulse. You can say this will come back to harm your children and you have an obligation to your children. So that's very powerful. I think that you're right. Okay. And speaking of which, just because I'm always interested in trends and so you've been at Laurier for a number of years. Have you seen like I don't know if if if you've seen an increase, like the fluctuation, but everything we're talking about, about the ideology, about the division and the hate basically, and discrimination getting worse, getting better or plateauing, what are we talking about over that? You know, the what you've seen. I think it's getting a lot more hostile toward the majority population. It is just a given that you can malign white people. It's just a given that you can malign men as particularly white men, and it's not even given a thought. Now, at my own university, we have, as of our core mandates, they did a strategic plan to say, what are we about as a university? And one of the core mandates is to I want to get this right to de-center whiteness. And here's the truth. You've just put in that term the color of skin of the majority population, and they. Have centered whiteness and doing so. Exactly. Thank you. Exactly. And they don't even see their own hypocrisy and irony and paradox. They don't even see that. And what does that even mean? Because you cannot eliminate from the person. You can't say whiteness is this and this is what they try to do. It's a bit of it's sophistry. It's mental gymnastics. whiteness is not white people. really? Then who else are you? Just. And so it's this this really intentional discrimination. And and then they create all of these Kafka traps that that allow you that you can't even speak against it. Well, if you speak against it, you're a racist. You know, if you question the idea of whiteness, then then it somehow or the other one sorry, it's the idea that, well, whites can't people of color cannot be racist anyway. So we can't even if we use this term, it can't be racist because we can't be racist because only only white people can be racist. So you know that this can't be a racist term because we can't be racist. And it's just. And I'll say what my I'll say what my biracial son says all the time.

Well, then what about me? Because I feel like he he's 12 and he's able to kind of stuff that conversation pretty dead on when he says things like that because where does somebody like him fit in in that conversation? He's just as white as he is. BROWN Absolutely. And so I do want to you didn't ask me this question, but I'm going to give you an answer for something you didn't ask yet. And it relates to the DEI research paper that I did because other people have asked me, well, what should we do then? And you've really hit on it here. It or at least in my mind it, tweet me to respond. But we really just have to go back to what we were doing that was successful and that was treating everyone as individuals and and saying, I'm going to judge you on your character. And I know that gets overused in MLK, Martin Luther King and all that stuff. But you actually that was that was good. There's there's value to it. It really is a perfect way to frame it. Let's depend on the character and I can prove to you that that worked. If you look at every sociological measure moving from even from the 1940s, but let's take from the 1960s and related to racism, it was going down precipitously. It was just it was crashing from the 1960s. What were we doing? We were saying treat everybody equally. Judging by the content of your character on measures such as so sociologists will ask you, don't ask people, are you racist? Because then they'll lie. But what you can do are ask more subtle questions like, Would you mind if someone from another race lived next to you? Would you mind if someone from another race married your son or daughter? And so they're more willing, especially on anonymous surveys, they're more willing to respond truthfully here and on all those measures, we've become more and more accepting. I mean, it's almost to the point where we're almost at absolute zero. It's only about a fringe. 10% will even register any kind of complaint there. And all that happened previous to die previous to anti racism, education and what were we doing? We were saying treat people as individuals, judge them on their character. It was working. And now we're going in the opposite direction. And it's been since the introduction of D-I, anti-racism, education, critical race theory. So in fact, it is exactly what you shouldn't be doing. It's adding fuel to the fire. Yeah, I think that there's so much more we could talk about, but I know that we want to be mindful of time here, but I think that's a great place for us to and I think that summarizes a lot of what we discussed. Great. Well, I've really enjoyed our conversation together and in particular because you guys helped me think through a few things. It was a really great discussion. Yes, it absolutely was. And thank you so much, Dave for being with us today. It was my pleasure. Yeah. So thanks so much. And not only that, I always say this, thank you for the work that you're actually doing. You're putting you're putting your neck there. We don't have F-you money, so you you are at risk. But your values, your faith, it you know, I see it. It drives you to do the right thing. And I hope that, you know, other people will emulate that because otherwise, where are we headed? Absolutely. Well, I had a pastor who used to say, if you're given a compliment, you always say, praise God, brother. that's going to get us Demonetized canceled and everything. That's not there, you know. All right. Well, thank you so much. And on that note for everyone. Until next time, keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.